In the poems which treat of the love of man and woman Browning regards the union of soul with soul as the capital achievement of life, and also as affording one of its chief tests.  When we have formed these into a group we perceive that the group falls in the main into two divisions—­poems which tell of attainment, and poems which tell of failure or defeat.  Certain persons whose centre is a little hard kernel of egoism may be wholly disqualified for the test created by a generous passion.  Browning does not belabour with heavy invective the Pretty Woman of his poem, who is born without a heart; she is a flower-like creature and of her kind is perfect; only the flower is to be gazed at, not gathered; or, if it must be gathered, then at last to be thrown away.  The chief distinction between the love of man and the love of woman, implied in various poems, is this—­the man at his most blissful moment cries “What treasures I have obtained!” the woman cries “What treasures have I to surrender and bestow?” Hence the singleness and finality in the election of passion made by a woman as compared with a man’s acquisitiveness of delight.  The unequal exchange of a transitory for an enduring surrender of self is the sorrow which pulsates through the lines of In a Year, as swift and broken with pauses as the beating of a heart: 

    Dear, the pang is brief,
     Do thy part,
    Have thy pleasure!  How perplexed
     Grows belief! 
    Well, this cold clay clod
     Was man’s heart: 
    Crumble it and what comes next? 
     Is it God?

And with no chilling of love on the man’s part, this is the point of central pain, in that poem of exquisite and pathetic distrust at the heart of trust and admiration, Any Wife to any Husband; noble and faithful as the husband has been, still he is only a man.  But elsewhere Browning does justice to the pure chivalry of a man’s devotion.  Caponsacchi’s joy is the joy of a saviour who himself is saved; the great event of his life by which he is lifted above self is single and ultimate; his soul is delivered from careless egoism once and for ever; the grace of love is here what the theologians called invincible grace, and invincible grace, we know, results in final perseverance.  Even here in Men and Women two contrasted poems assure us that, while the passion of a man may be no more than Love in a Life, it may also be an unweariable Life in a Love.

Of the poems of attainment one—­Respectability—­has the spirit of youth and gaiety in it.  Here love makes its gallant bid for freedom, fires up for lawlessness, if need be, and at least sets convention at defiance: 

    The world’s good word!—­the Institute! 
     Guizot receives Montalembert! 
     Eh?  Down the court three lampions flare: 
    Set forward your best foot!